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Saturday, October 6, 2012

8 SEO Tips For Ruining Journalism (Link Round-Up 10/5/12)

Launched in 2008, Bleacher Report meteorically rose to become one of the nation's most popular websites, and one of the three most-visited sports sites. Its dramatic success came via valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic "quality" or even readability. Operating a sports website on a supply-and-demand model turns out just as one would expect: High-trafficking Bleacher Report articles include "25 Wardrobe Malfunctions in Sports," "The 20 Biggest Criers in Sports," and "10 Possible Tiger Woods Porn Spin-offs: Mistress Edition." The site quickly earned a rep for expertly employing the Google search engine to inundate the web with horrible, lowest-common-denominator crap.

In some ways, the Columbiners are not so different from the Beliebers. The main difference, of course, is that Justin Bieber is unattainable because he's a famous pop musician, while Harris and Klebold are famous because they are murderers, and unattainable because they are dead. But a girl with a crush has more in common with another girl with a crush than she does with a regular civilian. Both groups tend to speak in the self-consciously cute vernacular of internet teens ("*fangirling*"; "UGH every time i look at him i just flail around for a minute"), making fun of their own intensity even as they indulge it. They appreciate crooked smiles, strong forearms, and boys who write bad poetry about love (Beiber: "If I could just die in your arms/I wouldn't mind"; Klebold: "I, who write this, love you beyond infinince").

And both groups have flocked to Tumblr to showcase their love—not surprising, actually, since Tumblr turns out to be the perfect medium for a crush shrine, one that's far more dynamic and interactive than a scrapbook or a bedroom wall. It allows posts and re-posts of pictures, quotes, gifs, and video clips while discouraging wider analysis or any sort of logical connection between content. Instead, the obsession acts as its own context. Every internet trinket relating to the crush object—a photograph of his parents' house, a doodle in the margin of his math homework, a yearbook photo, a stock photo of the gun he preferred, his autopsy report—is relevant, because a girl with a crush is omnivorous, and very, very hungry.

The concept of awkward men seeking online love appears to create a resentment issue for the women who end up fielding that search. Like Fedoras of OKC, Forever Alone Fedoras is apparently run by a woman fed up with the relative frequency of messages on dating sites from men wearing “these horrible hats that are an instant deal-breaker.”

Says Forever Alone Fedoras: “a fedora speaks volumes about one’s character. It implies that he is a basement dwelling, live action role playing, no social skills having, complete and utter geek in the worst sense of the word.”

Because these laws appeal to extra-legal and extra-constitutional sentiments, values and principles that exist above and beyond the law itself, they lend themselves perfectly to abusive and discriminatory application. In the case of prosecutions regarding the dissemination of the inflammatory, offensive anti-Islam online video clip "The Innocence of Muslims," a Coptic Christian named Albert Saber has been arrested and remains in detention for allegedly posting the clip online. But no measures have been taken against the Salafist Al-Nas television station that broadcast significant portions of the video to its large audience in the earliest effort to whip up a public frenzy that led directly to the violent incidents that rocked the Middle East a few weeks ago.

Al-Nas defended its actions as responsibly alerting the public to a "threat" to Islam, but in fact it was the principal vehicle for disseminating the content of the clip in the Arab world. Had they ignored it, the ensuing chaos might well never have come to pass. The channel cynically served as the main public relations vehicle for the video, because the Saudi-funded extremist station and its radical backers understood that their political allies would be the direct beneficiaries of public outrage, which they were delighted to stoke to a fever pitch.

As political leaders in Burma hold their hand out to America for economic prosperity, mobs of Rakhine Buddhists are killing their fellow citizens, the Rohingya Muslim and leaving their villages in ashes. The U.S. State Dept and even the famous Burmese political leader An Aan Suu Kyi remains silent over the suffering of the Rohingya.

One of the regular chants of the anti-Muslim protesters here, is that the Rohingya people are "illegal immigrants from Bangladesh". However the Rohingya community according to historical accounts, has been in Burma for hundreds of years.

"Bhutan has decided to go for a green economy in light of the tremendous pressure we are exerting on the planet," said Agriculture Minister Pema Gyamtsho to AFP.

"If you go for very intensive agriculture it would imply the use of so many chemicals, which is not in keeping with our belief in Buddhism, which calls for us to live in harmony with nature," Gyamtsho added.

Agriculture is the biggest sector of the Bhutanese economy, according to the WFP, and the majority of farmers grow rice and maize, the two primary foods.

Historically Africa has been bereft of wired telecoms infrastructure. There was a statistic bandied about in the 1990s that Manhattan had more phone lines than the 55 countries in Africa. Impossible to verify, but it reveals the scale of the communications problem. Until mobile phones came along, that is.

Cellphones have made it possible for anyone to have a phone -- to make calls, send SMSes and, using clever payment systems like Kenya's M-Pesa, send mobile money to another phone user. Half of Kenya's GDP now moves through mobile money, and M-Pesa reportedly handles $20-million a day in transactions.

Mobile money is projected to become a $617-billion industry by 2016, according to researchers Gartner, who predict mobile transactions will reach $171-billion this year. Already, 80% of the world's mobile money transactions are happening in East Africa, driven by Kenya, the epicentre of mobile innovation.

“It was reported that factory management and Apple, despite design defects, raised strict quality demands on workers, including indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers,” notes China Labor Watch. “With such demands, employees could not even turn out iPhones that met the standard.”

While her predecessor enjoyed the international limelight, Ms Rousseff is an indifferent diplomat. She ruffled US and European feathers at the UN General Assembly last month by claiming that Islamophobia is on the rise in developed countries. But generally she describes a Brazil that is everyone’s friend, with special relationships with Lusophone African countries and its close ties with Europe through immigration. “The world for us is a multipolar one,” she says.